Tutorial: Drupal 8 Site Building preview - Less is more

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll dig into the main Drupal 8 site building tasks and how they’ve been changed in the next version of Drupal. In today’s introduction, I want to give you some observations about the site building experience in Drupal 8. I’m starting in this post by pointing out what modules are GONE from core in Drupal 8- and what contrib modules you won’t need to install since that functionality is included in Drupal 8.

However, if you're looking for the drastic differences you saw between Drupal 6 and 7, you'll be disappointed. It seems that the site building experience hasn't significantly changed.

The few key changes that have been made are wide-reaching. For example, the inclusion of “form modes” affects anything with fields. While these new abstractions offer flexibility, as an instructor, I know they might be potentially confusing - at first! That's why I'll be going into that in more detail in an upcoming post.

I’d say overall site building in Drupal 8 has some great improvements. From a simple point of view that there will be less to install! There are some modules removed from core, and many contrib modules replaced by new functionality in core. Let's see what's gone.

Less is more!

In our Drupal 7 Site Building course , we spend a significant chunk of time on “how to improve the content editing experience”, because we know that internal adoption can make or break the success of a new site. I was amazed to see much of that is being mooted by Drupal 8, as many of the configuration changes we teach developers are being baked right into the new version. I detailed some of those content editing improvements in my previous blog post (Content editing enhancements in Drupal 8.)

I think overall this means site building is greatly improved in Drupal 8; and you’ll be able to do much more “out of the box” without depending on as many custom modules. I’m just sort of agog thinking about what this means.

It’s funny because we emphasize how much has been added to the Drupal 8 core- when we’re not considering the implication: This removes lots of required contrib modules from a garden variety Drupal site! AND it ensures everyone is getting these excellent benefits.

Many of the most commonly used modules (or modules with similar functionality) have been included in Drupal 8. This means you don’t necessarily need Display Suite anymore, since you can add customized view modes. You don’t need the link module, or the basic date module, they’re in there. You don’t need BEAN module anymore since you can add fields to blocks. You don’t even need to throw in the Save Draft module, since they fixed that confusing publishing button. And of course Views is available right in Drupal core now.

It goes without saying that this has huge benefits for site builders, especially those new to Drupal. It’s been disheartening to meet people who’ve been using Drupal and didn’t know even Views existed.

Bye bye to these core site building modules!

I wouldn’t say we should mourn the loss of things removed from Drupal 8, but consider them reborn! For example, I think there’s excellent potential for a robust Blog module for Drupal- but it was stifled somewhat from growth. Some of these have been spun out into their own projects, or replaced.

Contrib modules you won’t need! Some were included, some were mooted.

Overall the changes in Drupal 8 imply that you will need fewer contributed modules to get most garden variety websites developed. I think this means there will be less chance for new people to miss tricks. Here's a list of popular modules from Drupal 7 contrib which are now no longer needed.

Some have been added, but most have been deprecated or are no longer needed as similar functionality is available. It may be however, that for advanced functionality you'll turn to the full modules. For example, Views Bulk Operations will offer additional actions.

Features https://drupal.org/project/features - You now longer need Features for configuration management, though it might still be useful for packaging up sets of functionality, which was Features original intended use.

Services https://drupal.org/project/services - Output more than just HTML. You can now integrate external applications with Drupal. Service callbacks may be used with multiple interfaces like REST, XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, SOAP, AMF, etc

The major improvements to translation in Drupal 8 are a results of years of effort by an amazing team. That is why they've made the biggest contribution to this list. Anything to do with either the content translation approach (core & i18n module) or the entity translation approach (entity_translation) is now not needed. Check out this webinar on Multilingual Improvements in Drupal 8, August 2013, Gábor Hojtsy.

I hope you’re looking forward to really digging into Drupal 8 and seeing how things have changed- for the better. Here's some tips on keeping on top of the changes.

Keeping on top of changes

Downloading the latest version of Drupal 8 still gives you daily surprises. (Hello! Comments converted to fields committed last week!) It’s fun to keep track of progress.

Drupal 8 has brought about so many little changes you just want to hug. Some are even being back-ported to Drupal 7 so you don't have to wait.

I just want to show you this really quick: Now you see the dimensions of image styles e.g., "Style name (80x80)" as you use them. How nice is that? Seems kind of obvious you wonder why Drupal didn’t have it before. But yay! And yes, this has been backported for Drupal 7.23 now.

Comments

VBO in core doesn't support configurable actions, which are a
major use case (people select results, then on the next page configure
the action, by selecting the category to be added, for instance, then
execute).
So I'm guessing most people will still want to download VBO once
it has been ported.

I'd also not say Display suite and Features will be unneeded
(DS even has a D8 branch), they definitely will, just less.

Good point. I had the caveat about VBO "for most things" and the
caveat about Features for configuration management.

Also good point about DS. Since the layout changes for D8 weren't
fully realized, there is certainly going to be a place for more robust
layout options, whether site builders choose DS, Panels, or some other
module.

Hello! If you're interested in making Drupal websites
multilingual, I suggest you have a look at the online translation
platform https://poeditor.com/
It's a very efficient solution for software localization.

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